The Disappearing Act

In this captivating and capacious novel from Stepanova (In Memory of Memory), a 50-year-old novelist experiences a bizarre and liberating metamorphosis while in exile from her unnamed home country, which has just started a devastating war with its neighbor. On a train to a literary festival in another country, M, a native Russian speaker who hasn’t written anything in a while, can’t escape the feeling that “her life now boiled down to reading the news and military dispatches,” and that there is a beast inside of her barely kept at bay by the “façade of politeness.” When her train is abruptly halted due to a rail strike, M finds herself stranded in a small coastal town. With her phone dead, she reads the health warnings on her box of cigarettes and thinks about tarot cards. In a liminal state, she wanders onto a circus ground where the company of sideshow performers have recently lost their magician. M volunteers to save their act by participating in a trick in which she appears to be sawed in half. Seemingly reborn and alive to herself for the first time in years after the performance, M now says her name is A, and she leaves behind her passive former self. Far from a literary gimmick, the novel comes across as an urgent call to resist complacency and recover one’s vitality in the face of injustice. It’s a stunner. (Feb.)